Sweded
August 18, 2010
It says a lot about a movie when the Nazis are incidental to the story. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo starts dark, then gets darker, then darker still before those guys turn up. After that, things take a turn for the worse. Lisbeth Salander is raped three times and fights back three times, is mugged once - trivially, almost, by way of character introduction. She is catatonic when questioned about her photographic memory yet nimble and commanding when the plot requires it. She would be the thinking man's Tank Girl if the men in the story could conceptualise but the men are Swedish and mostly just good at procedure, handling documentation as carefully as torture. When Elisabeth is raped the second time her attacker is prepared with not one but two sets of handcuffs. Does this mean he planned the act ahead of time, or that he'd done it before? Either scenario raises questions than are not answered. But this was early in the film, before it got darker, and Lisbeth fought back anyway - it was only a bump on the road towards even darker things.
As the investigative reporter (is there any other kind?) Mikael, Michael Nyqvist mostly types, in between getting beaten up. As Lisbeth Noomi Rapace is stone-faced; Nyqvist is cartoon-Swede gloomy. When he is finally startled awake by a grazing bullet his surprise is comical, like Kate Capshaw in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. By the time (spoiler alert) Lisbeth rescues him he's weak and unattractive. Even the chick in the basement of Silence of the Lambs fought back: Mikael is The Girl no modern film would allow. At the point when the movie requires him and Elisabeth to have sex he's as surprised as we are.
The film's central mystery is an unfolding flower of texts and digital artefacts that reveal a plot very like James Ellroy's novel The Black Dahlia. The violence is nothing that hasn't been depicted before, in particular in the print and screen version of Thomas Harris's Red Dragon (the Michael Mann version) but in the end it wasn't the characters' endless victimisation that disturbed me so much as the way they all bounced back reliably to exact revenge. What sort of person suffers without empathy or despair? Robots? Nazis? Cartoons? Every character in this movie ends up either dead or a villain, the heroes included.
As the investigative reporter (is there any other kind?) Mikael, Michael Nyqvist mostly types, in between getting beaten up. As Lisbeth Noomi Rapace is stone-faced; Nyqvist is cartoon-Swede gloomy. When he is finally startled awake by a grazing bullet his surprise is comical, like Kate Capshaw in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. By the time (spoiler alert) Lisbeth rescues him he's weak and unattractive. Even the chick in the basement of Silence of the Lambs fought back: Mikael is The Girl no modern film would allow. At the point when the movie requires him and Elisabeth to have sex he's as surprised as we are.
The film's central mystery is an unfolding flower of texts and digital artefacts that reveal a plot very like James Ellroy's novel The Black Dahlia. The violence is nothing that hasn't been depicted before, in particular in the print and screen version of Thomas Harris's Red Dragon (the Michael Mann version) but in the end it wasn't the characters' endless victimisation that disturbed me so much as the way they all bounced back reliably to exact revenge. What sort of person suffers without empathy or despair? Robots? Nazis? Cartoons? Every character in this movie ends up either dead or a villain, the heroes included.